A spokesman
for the Accor Group in Paris, which owns the Sofitel
in New York, told Le Monde that the two men
who participated in the victory can longer recall what
they were celebrating in the loading dock of the Sofitel
on May 14, 2011. So we have a memory gap.

The dance
occurred between 1:34 and 1:35 pm, just a minute or
so after nearly 4-minute call 911 call to the police
was completed. While I had mistakingly said that the
dance (instead of the sequence) was 3 minutes, it actually
was only 17 seconds. The issue remains: what event
were these two men were celebrating.

One explanation
offered in the media is that these two men, both New
Yorkers, may have been celebrating the previous night’s
New York Yankee baseball game. As it turns out, the
New York Yankees lost that game to the Boston Red Sox,
their third loss in a row. So the two men would have
been celebrating a loss.

The problem with even this explanation is that it suggests
that 1:34 p.m. was the first time that these two men
were able to go off together to the loading dock to
hold their celebration dance. In fact, as yet another
surveillance CCTV shows, both men were together in a
room off the Reception desk at approximately 12:55 for
nearly 4 minutes. In tape D, we see the well-dressed
man emerge from the elevator at 12:53. (Two minutes
earlier he had entered the Presidential suite on the
28th floor for the second tine, according to the electronic
key records.) We see him pass through the lobby.
stop in security area, return to the lobby where at
12:55, he is joined by the other dancer. Both
men then go into a small room on side of reception desk.

Lanny Davis, a well-regarded Washington crisis manager,
who the Accord group retained to handle this matter,
offered a far more plausible explanation of the victory
dance on the NBC
Today Show. Although acknowledging the men had a
memory gap, he suggested that it was possible that they
were celebrating that the housekeeper had just agreed
“to allow the hotel to call 911.” Davis’
conjecture here raises, however, the issue of what impediment
had caused the hour long delay in the decision to call
in the police. The prosecution summary of the
case states that her outcry was reported to hotel security
which then called 911. It does not say that she
delayed the decision to call in the police for an hour.